The challenges of giving access to digital archives for Indigenous communities: a collaborative experience with the Wayana in French Guiana

"The challenges of giving access to digital archives for Indigenous communities : a collaborative experience with the Wayana in French Guiana" Presented by Valentina Vapnarsky at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 Digitalized and born-digital collections about endangered languages are often hidden behind or inside digital platforms that are cryptic to non-initiated communities, and hence to the source communities directly concerned by the collections. This talk will open discussion on this issue and the dilemma between large powerful platforms and more native ones, based on a particular collaborative experience of creating with a group of Wayana and Apalai people from French Guyana, a digital platform that attempts to meet their demand for access to linguistic, ethnographic, and ethno-musical collections about them, in a linguistically and culturally appropriate way. A platform that would also allow for the requalification, correction and enrichment of old collections, and the addition of new digital material. Yet some intrinsic difficulties appeared along the way.